1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to a system and method for managing content over a network of storage devices. More specifically, the invention relates to a network organizational system and method that manages the storage of content across one or more network storage devices.
2. Description of Related Art
Over the past several years, the Internet has experienced explosive growth. A significant portion of this growth relates to the expanded use of the World Wide Web (the Web). The Web is a group of computer on the Internet providing a distributed hypermedia framework for presenting and viewing multimedia documents.
Web pages may contain a variety of multimedia elements and links to other Web pages. Pages are generally constructed using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) although other document formatting standards may play a role such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Extensible Markup Language (XML)—and its progeny such as the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF).
Once a page is created, the page resides on a Web server system, or Web site. A particular Web site may host a variety of pages. Client computers can access pages residing on Web sites using a variety of commonly available browser software packages such as Internet Explorer (Microsoft), Netscape (Netscape) or other similar product.
The browser software and the server system communicate with each other using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The client issues a request for a particular resource on the Web using a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI); typically in the case of an HTML Web page, the URI will be a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URL specifically identifies a particular resource such as a Web page on the Web. The URL will indicate the particular computer on the Web on which the desired Web page resides, as well as the location of the desired Web page on that computer.
A browser software on a client computer generates an HTTP request under a variety of user triggered circumstances such as entering a target URL, selecting a link in a currently viewed page, selecting an item from the browser's history list or pressing the home button. In addition, HTTP requests are generated automatically when other discrete resources are included within a retrieved Web page; for instance, a second HTTP request would be generated for requesting and retrieving an image embedded within page retrieved from an initial user triggered HTTP request.
When the Web server indicates in the URL receives the request, the server parses the location information in the URL. Servers utilize a recursive hierarchical directory structure for storing Web available resources. The parsed location information from the request serves as a map by which the server locates the requested resource. The server formats an HTTP response including the requested resource and forwards the response to the requesting client.
With the tremendous proliferation of Web usage, the volume of requests has overburdened single Web servers. As seen in FIG. 1, which illustrates a known server system 180 that deals with this problem utilizing a load balancing server 120 and a cluster 110 of identical Web servers 114, 118 where each servers stores all Web pages for the site. Dynamic content may be available through database server 130 connected to data repository 140. The load balancing server 120 is connected to a local ethernet 154 controlled via a router 154. The system is connected to the Internet 160 through the ethernet 154 and router 154. End users access the server system 180 through end user computers 170.
This solution has several disadvantages. First, all Web servers must redundantly store all pages for the single logical Web site. Second, the load balancing server must deal with the flow through for all communication between the client and the selected server in the cluster.
The same content management issues also occur within the context of mulitmedia content servers having a set of file servers and a set of network attached storage systems. Even in load balancing systems, communications must repeatedly flow through the file servers rather than directly between the client and the data storage systems.
The prior art systems do not support the efficient distribution of multiple simultaneous file requests to a single logical server. Further, they do not provide for establishment of direct communication paths between clients and data storage systems. Finally, current systems usually require redundant storage of all data on each data storage system. The system according to the present invention addresses these disadvantages.